HORN HONKING

 If You Love Peace & Quiet, Honk Your Horn

I am as guilty as anyone else when it comes to taking note of what we consider negative things or trends while ignoring the many positive things that constantly surrounds us. Indeed, if one reads all that I have written lately, the conclusion would certainly be that I only feel compelled to give voice to things that I consider wrong or at least, not correct. Sadly, I can say that upon rereading my stuff, few words can be found that point out what is going well with the world, only wording that promotes concern and worry. Perhaps the reason for this imbalance is that I am only running the master DNA program that God, or Mother nature if you prefer, programmed into all of us standard Mark 1, Mod 0 human type people, i.e., we have a survival instinct that is inherent to us all and this programmed instinct causes us to focus on negative things more than positive things so that we can consolidate our actions to prevent circumstances from disturbing our well-being, or worse still, cause our ruin.

Well, that my ten-cent theory, if you have a better one, I would like to hear about it. One thing I know for certain is that how we look at things to determine if they are positive or negative depends in large measure upon our perspective and our perspective is a result of our respective life experiences to date. For example, my Grandfather had a sign over his desk that he would always point to when I complained about a perceived injustice or that everyone always seemed to have more desirable stuff than I had. The sign read:

“I complained I had no shoes to wear until I saw a man with no feet.”

I think that old sign sums up the perspective thing rather nicely. I can also remember how my Grandmother once told me how wonderful things had gotten during her lifetime (circa 1887-1954). She said the most important improvement was that people are so much better looking now than in her day because modern faces are no longer being scared by the Pox and everyone was more graceful because contemporary people were no longer being broken by hard physical labor. I know about the hard physical labor thing because labor killed my Stepmother’s Father before he could reach 50 years. His premature death was a result of the hard physical labor required of him by being a laborer in the Stone Quarries of Bedford Indiana and he was done in before disease and other age related infirmities could take their due.

 My own personal perspective about things like this is that I can remember winters in Indianapolis when the primary heating for residents was coal fired stoves and the like. The coal burning produced black soot that fell from the smoke stacks and covered everything and everyone so that just staying clean and breathing was a full time job. With this coal soot perspective in mind, it’s understandable why someone like me would find it difficult to get all excited when the Penthouse Environmentalists* tell us that we must continuously do more and more to help Mother Earth get back to a pristine state of cleanliness or we all are gonna die while gasping for breath in polluted air that will not sustain life worth living. So when a contemporary person’s perspective about air quality is that today’s air is dirty, it is because they have been repeatedly told that the air is indeed dirty and needs to be made completely void of man’s byproducts in order to arrive at the final desired state of cleanliness.

Of course my perspective about today’s air is that the air is wonderful compared to what I lived in during my younger days when we had soot, sulfur, and God only knows what, to breathe. My perspective about clean air causes me to be concerned about the necessity of wrecking our economy and jobs to arrive at an unreachable and mostly academic notion of clean air when today’s air, while not perfect and can always be prudently improved, is a remarkable improvement over what was before. As a matter of fact, I am thankful that the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) was created and is responsible for the wonderful air we have today. Here is the problem. Once an Agency is created and the bureaucrats are entrenched, they must continuously expand their reach and authority in order to remain viable.

This means that the air will never be clean enough, the water will never be clear enough and the environment will never be pristine enough. So how do we determine when enough is enough of a good thing? Therein lies the dilemma is being positive or negative. In any event, young people have no idea what a blessing modern life is today and the idealistic notion that we need to get to a more natural state of living is naivety at its grandest folly. I just wonder when today’s youth grow up to become old geezers like me, will their perspective be that their modern lives are much better than when they were young? I hope so. However, I’m afraid they too will be mostly negative about things because they also want things to continuously improve just like those who proceeded them and that requires that we be mostly negative. So keep on honking those horns for peace and quiet, it’s really not as illogical as it sounds. 

* Penthouse Environmentalists.

Those well meaning, but out of touch souls, who bang on Teflon covered pots and stainless steel pans about the necessity of saving Mother Earth from the evil humans. They have actually persuaded the ideologues in the Environmental Protection Agency to rule that the exhaled breath of animals, which includes humans, is a pollutant. I kid you not. All plant life will also be surprised at the news that CO2 is a pollutant, because CO2 is the building block for all things green. After a hard day’s work saving Mother Earth from all things human, the Penthouse Environmentalists climb into their Beamers to go home to their electrically wired, air-conditioned and WiFied Condos, and feel really, really good.